Category: Battle of Thermopylae

This year is the 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Thermopylae, when the Spartan king Leonidas and around 5,000 Greek warriors stood boldly against hundreds of thousands of invaders led by the Persian king Xerxes. For two whole days, Leonidas and his men held off the Persians at a narrow pass in central Greece, killing…

Ancient Greek warfare and conflict was a common reoccurrence during archaic and classical periods due to the fact that the city states were quarrelsome whether it be because of religious difference ( the worshiping of different Greek gods) , political and philosophical differences. The common soldiery of ancient Greece were free citizens primary consisted of…

The theory of the Spartan Mirage was first coined by Francois Ollier in the 1930s. Francois Ollier was a French historian who published a book titled Le Mirage Spartiate. The book outlined the effect of distortion of Sparta found in ancient writers like Xenophon, Plutarch, and Herodotus. These books have created a picture that the…

The battle of Thermopylae, under the king Xerxes (486-456 BC) the Great son of Darius the Great, was another victory for Persians in the fifth century. The Persians were advancing on the battleground with their full might. Five million, two hundred and eighty-three thousand, two hundred and twenty men excluding the cooks, women, and concubines…